Cowboy Jack Clement
“The world will always welcome cowboys…as time goes by,” sang pop music’s own seriously jovial jester and sage, with that very Cowboy Jack Clement modification applied to the old standard.
“As Time Goes By” may well be featured, as a foxtrot, on Clement’s planned album of dance songs of all styles. He introduced a few more of those, too, in this fairly rare but fully welcome evening with Jack and his friends. There was “Hernando’s Hideaway”, with very Latin sax, as the tango; a manic “Brazil” as the samba; and his own celebrated “Guess Things Happen That Way” with a rhumba beat, the way (he informed the crowd) he’d written it in the first place. Jack gracefully crooned the Irving Berlin via Fred Astaire number “Let’s Face The Music And Dance”, too.
The dance-songs album from this onetime Arthur Murray Studio instructor has been developing at a leisurely pace (as all of his albums do), and Jack might just work up a DVD version demonstrating the appropriate steps for each number if people keep reminding him that it’s a swell idea. Or not.
The comfortable 3rd & Lindsley Bar & Grill was packed for this two-hour, show, despite an outside temperature of eight degrees or so. (“Not very Clement,” Jack noted.) Nashville knows that Jack will bring the songs and the players, and he did. It’s hard to go too far wrong when your own songs include “It’ll Be Me” and “Dirty Old Egg Suckin’ Dog”, “Just Someone I Used To Know” and “Let’s Help The Cowboy Sing The Blues” (“my advertisement,” he labeled that last one, a hit for Waylon Jennings.) We also got to hear some numbers Jack hasn’t quite gotten around to recording, such as the sly and nobly trashy “If You See Katy”, a phrase you need to say out loud if you want to understand where the song goes.
One on one, Jack expressed some qualms about how he was going to sound this night; he hasn’t been singing much lately, having been recuperating from a colon operation. He noted this after sitting down at our table, pulling up his shirt and showing us the scar now running up his belly; it appeared to be a deftly executed piece of surgery with a good backbeat. You could dance to it. Jack sounded fine.
The band more than helped, as you might figure, given who these longtime friends and musical collaborators of Jack turned out to be. The core group was the Jay Patten Band, fronted by that hot R&B saxman who’s worked with everyone from Crystal Gayle to the Glen Miller Orchestra, with Memphis studio legend Bobby Wood (who’s worked with Wilson Pickett and Elvis) on keyboards, and Mike Loudermilk (son of John D.) on stinging electric guitar. You have to play anything to back Jack; this band handled the job. They were joined for the second half of the 30 or so numbers by the estimable Billy Burnette and Shawn Camp, among the brighter younger lights in Nashville as writers and performers both, and, as varied as they are in the country and rock sounds they handle, clear Clement disciples.
Jack quietly sang a very touching version of Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” at one point, which made me realize for the first time how much better that chestnut sounds when sung by someone who has passed the 70 mark. He finished off with his patented, jaunty rendition of the Stones’ “No Expectations”. From Jack, an audience can actually expect plenty; on this cold night, they got more.
Studio video of Cowboy Jack Clement singing his song “Just A Girl I Used To Know” with members of Old Crow Medicine Show backing him up.